Practical guides

How to share customer reviews on social media, and what the rules allow

A good review is the cheapest marketing material a local business ever gets, and the most commonly misused. The assumption is that a review written about you, on your own listing, is yours to post. Three of the organisations with a say in it disagree in writing: Google, which says the review belongs to the person who wrote it and asks for their consent; Trustpilot, which sells the right to display its stars and forbids quotes out of context; and, in the United Kingdom, Parliament, which put publishing reviews in a misleading way on the list of practices banned in all circumstances.

None of this makes sharing reviews a bad idea. It makes it a job with four requirements — consent, attribution, context and currency — that take about a minute each and are almost never done. This guide quotes each requirement where it is written, then sets out the method: how to ask for permission in the one channel Google leaves you, which reviews to post and which to leave alone, and what has to be on the image for the post to be defensible.

The last part is about your own site, and it includes the single most expensive misunderstanding in this whole area: the widget that promises review stars in Google Search. Google's own documentation rules out that arrangement in plain words, and one of the products in question is ours.

Who owns a review about your business

This is the first question and almost nobody asks it. The review sits on your listing, it names your business, it was written to help other people find you — and it is not yours. Google's position is written down in its brand guidance for businesses, and it has a practical sting in the tail: consent is required, and Google will not give you any way of asking except the public reply box.

Google's own guidance to businesses settles the ownership question in one line: “User reviews belong to the person who wrote them, even if they're written on your business's listing.” And it draws the consequence: “You must get consent from the reviewer if you want to use customer reviews of your business” — for your website, for print and for digital ads. The review on your profile is not stock you own because it was addressed to you. Source: Google, Customer reviews, Google Partner Marketing Hub (Google's own brand guidance for businesses, What you may do with a Google review outside Google, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-reviews-belong

Google requires consent and then refuses to help you get it: “Google can't provide you with additional contact information.” The only channel it leaves is the public reply under the review, which is why asking permission belongs in the reply you were going to write anyway, while the customer is still pleased with you. Source: Google, Customer reviews, Google Partner Marketing Hub (Google's own brand guidance for businesses, What you may do with a Google review outside Google, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-no-contact

If the review is on Trustpilot, read this before you design the post

Trustpilot treats its reviews, stars and TrustScore as its brand, and the rules are stricter than Google's in two directions at once: there is a commercial condition before you may display anything, and there is a list of design requirements for how the quote appears. If you have ever seen a flattering review in a carousel with no date, no star rating and no source, you have seen the three rules being broken at once.

On Trustpilot, the right to show your own reviews is sold, not given: “Only customers on one of our paid plans can use Trustpilot content (including reviews) in their advertising”, and “Businesses who aren't on a Trustpilot plan aren't allowed to display their TrustScore or Star Rating on their websites or in their marketing.” The reviews are about you and were written by your customers, and showing the score still depends on a subscription. Source: Trustpilot, Legal Brand Guidelines, version 2.0 (Trustpilot's own rules for using its content, How Trustpilot reviews may be shown outside Trustpilot, 1 February 2023). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-tp-brand-plan

Trustpilot's brand rules name the two shortcuts directly: “Don't use quotes from reviews out of context”, and on display, do not show “only five star reviews” or present an individual review's rating “in a way that suggests it is representative of the overall Star Rating”. On permission it stops at a recommendation rather than a requirement: “We recommend asking reviewers for their permission before using their reviews in any advertising.” Source: Trustpilot, Legal Brand Guidelines, version 2.0 (Trustpilot's own rules for using its content, How Trustpilot reviews may be shown outside Trustpilot, 1 February 2023). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-tp-brand-context

Trustpilot sets out what has to travel with the quote: “All Trustpilot reviews must be accompanied by our name and logo”, “Display the date of the review and the review's Star Rating beside the review quote”, and on your site, “Link back to your Trustpilot profile page when using our brand.” It also rules out the laziest implementation there is — “a static image of your TrustScore or Star Rating on your website” — because a picture of a score cannot go down. Source: Trustpilot, Legal Brand Guidelines, version 2.0 (Trustpilot's own rules for using its content, How Trustpilot reviews may be shown outside Trustpilot, 1 February 2023). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-tp-brand-attrib

Cherry-picking: the rule nobody expects to exist

Selecting your best reviews feels like the most ordinary marketing decision there is. It is also the thing the newest consumer-protection rules are aimed at, on both sides of the Atlantic, and they do not reach it through the reviews themselves — they reach it through what your display implies. If the wall of testimonials on your home page suggests it is what your customers think, and it is the top nine out of four hundred, the implication is the problem.

In the United Kingdom, selecting what the public sees is on the list of practices banned in all circumstances, in eight words: “Publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, in a misleading way.” It sits in the same paragraph as submitting fake reviews and hiding that a review was incentivised, which tells you how the drafters rank it. A testimonial wall of your nine best reviews out of four hundred is review information published in a misleading way. Source: United Kingdom, Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Schedule 20 (the text of the Act as enacted, the list of commercial practices banned in all circumstances, in force since 6 April 2025, 24 May 2024). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-uk-misleading

Businesses may not use groundless legal threats, intimidation or false accusations to get negative reviews removed, nor claim that the reviews they display represent all reviews when negative ones have been suppressed. Source: US Federal Trade Commission, Final Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (US federal rule, approved by the Commission 5-0, United States, 14 August 2024). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-ftc-ban-suppress

What has to be on the post

Attribution is where the platforms are most specific and most ignored. The rules are not aesthetic: a review is evidence, and evidence needs a source and a date to be worth anything. Google's requirements concern its own marks — including a rule that catches the single most common review-post design in the world, the five gold stars printed next to the word Google.

If you say the review came from Google, Google's brand rules apply to how you say it: “Include one of our logos (either the Google G or full Google wordmark)”, “Don't use any unofficial logos, badges, or lockups”, and the one that catches almost every review post ever designed — “Don't add stars by the Google name or logos.” For an overall score it also asks for a time stamp: “Include an “as of” date when sharing your overall rating or number of reviews.” Source: Google, Customer reviews, Google Partner Marketing Hub (Google's own brand guidance for businesses, What you may do with a Google review outside Google, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-logo-stars

How to share a customer review on social media

Eight steps, in the order you do them. The first two are the ones that get skipped, and they are the only two that make the difference between a post you can leave up and a post you take down when somebody complains.

85% of consumers are more likely to use a business after reading positive reviews. Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults, United States, 11 February 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-positive-85

1. Pick the review for its content, not its score.The useful review names something specific — the early appointment, the fitter who stayed late, the dish that was adapted. A five-star review that says “great service” has nothing to persuade anybody with, and spending consent on it is a waste of the one chance you get to ask.
2. Ask the reviewer, in a public reply.Google requires consent and will not give you a contact, so the reply box is the channel. One sentence: thank them for the specific thing, then “would you mind if we shared this on our page?” Then wait. A reply with no answer is not a yes.
3. Decide how much of their identity goes in.If they agree, agree to what: full name, first name only, initials, no photo. Offering the smaller version yourself gets more yeses, and it removes the awkward message six months later when they would rather not be the face of your Instagram.
4. Quote it as written, or extract honestly.Fix nothing except length. If the review has a reservation in it and you cut the reservation, you have made a different review — which is the practice the UK rule and Trustpilot's guidelines both name.
5. Put the source, the date and the review's own rating on the image.Use the official logo, no badge of your own invention, and keep the stars away from the platform's name and logo. This is the part a designer will argue with; the rules are published and they are the platform's to make.
6. Write a caption that adds the thing the review could not.The review says what happened to them. The caption says what you do about it for everybody: “this is why we hold the 7am slot.” A caption that only repeats the review in your own voice reads as self-congratulation, which is what makes review posts skippable.
7. Post it where a decision gets made, not only where it feels good.The same card belongs on the Google profile as an update, in the Instagram feed and — more usefully — in the next quote, proposal or confirmation email you send. The audience most moved by a review is the one already deciding.
8. Keep a record of the permission.A screenshot of the exchange, the date, and what they agreed to, in the same place as the post. It costs ten seconds and it is the entire defence if the reviewer changes their mind or a regulator asks what your basis was.

Which reviews to post, and how often

Reviews age in public faster than almost any other marketing asset, because the audience reads them as a statement about how you are now. That is the single criterion that should drive the calendar: a recent, ordinary review beats a glowing one from two years ago, and a feed of old praise reads as a business whose good years are behind it.

74% of consumers only care about reviews written in the last three months. Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults, United States, 11 February 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-recency-90

1. Default to the last three months.Most customers only care about recent reviews, so a post about a review from last week is making a claim about the present. If the best material is older than a quarter, the honest fix is to go and collect new reviews, not to post the old ones again.
2. Rotate the subject, not just the review.Four posts in a row about how friendly the staff are say one thing. Four posts about the early slot, the gluten-free prep, the warranty and the Saturday callout say your business works in four ways.
3. Pair a complaint with its answer, once in a while.The bravest and most effective review post is a three-star review with the fix underneath it. Nobody does it, which is precisely why it reads as true.
4. Keep a cadence you can hold for a year.One review post a week is sustainable and enough. The common pattern — eleven posts in the first fortnight and then nothing — advertises the enthusiasm of whoever set up the tool rather than anything about the business.

Your own website: the testimonial page, the widget, and the stars that are not coming

Putting reviews on your own site is both the most useful thing to do with them and the place where the clearest rule in this whole guide applies. Two separate things are often confused here: showing reviews to visitors, which is good and comes with a maintenance duty; and marking those reviews up so that Google prints stars under your result in search, which, for reviews about yourself on your own site, Google's documentation rules out.

The same UK paragraph puts a duty on whoever publishes reviews — your site, your widget, your app — of “Publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, without taking such reasonable and proportionate steps” as are necessary for “preventing the publication of” fake reviews, incentivised reviews that hide it, or review information that is “false or misleading”, and for “removing any such reviews or information from publication.” Embedding reviews on your own site is therefore a job with maintenance attached, not a decoration. Source: United Kingdom, Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Schedule 20 (the text of the Act as enacted, the list of commercial practices banned in all circumstances, in force since 6 April 2025, 24 May 2024). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-uk-steps

The stars most businesses are chasing in Google Search are ruled out for their own site by Google's own documentation. Local business and organisation markup is “only for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses”, and “If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review”. The same page adds “Ratings must be sourced directly from users.” Source: Google, Review snippet (Review, AggregateRating) structured data (Google Search's own documentation, Which reviews can produce stars in Google Search, and which cannot, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-snippet-self

Where review markup is allowed, Google requires that it describe what a visitor can actually see: “Make sure the review content you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page”, “It must be immediately obvious to users that the page has review content”, and “If you use AggregateRating, users should be able to see that aggregate rating on the page.” Markup that reports a score the page does not display is the case this rule exists for. Source: Google, Review snippet (Review, AggregateRating) structured data (Google Search's own documentation, Which reviews can produce stars in Google Search, and which cannot, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-snippet-visible

On what happens when markup and page disagree, Google is unambiguous: “Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content”, “Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page”, and “Don't mark up irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews or content unrelated to the focus of a page.” The penalty is specific rather than catastrophic: “A structured data manual action means that a page loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result; it doesn't affect how the page ranks in Google web search.” Source: Google, Structured data general guidelines (Google Search's own documentation, What happens to markup that does not match the page, 12 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-g-sd-true

1. Show the score with the reviews, live.A feed pulled from the platform, with the overall score, the count and the date range, is both more persuasive and the version that satisfies a display duty. A hand-built page of favourite quotes is the version that gets you in trouble.
2. Do not expect stars in Google Search from it.For reviews about you, collected and controlled by you, on your own pages, the review snippet is not available — Google's own documentation says those pages are ineligible. Any product that implies otherwise is selling a result it cannot deliver.
3. If you do mark something up, mark up what is on the page.Markup has to be a true representation of the page, visible to the reader, and obvious as review content. The worst case is not a penalty on your rankings: it is a structured-data manual action, which removes the page's eligibility for rich results and is tedious to get back.
4. Give the page an owner and a review date.The duty to take reasonable steps and to remove false or misleading review information does not care that the page was built by an agency in 2023. Someone has to look at it on a schedule, and the schedule should be written down somewhere a successor will find it.

What our own software does, and the part we cannot fix for you

We sell a share agent that posts reviews by itself and a widget that shows them on a website, so the rules above are rules we are measured by. Two things in that product need saying in public, next to the rule they touch, rather than discovered by a customer six months in.

Climbo's share agent turns a review into a picture and posts it. What goes into that picture is fixed: the review text, the star rating, the reviewer's name and the reviewer's profile photo as they appear on the platform, plus the source. The styling is yours — background, colours, font, layout, and the option to drop our branding — but there is no setting that strips the name or the photo, which is exactly the content Google says needs the reviewer's consent. Source: Climbo, Climbo review link and campaigns (Climbo's own product, What the software does, read in the product, 11 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-climbo-share-card

The agent does not post everything. On each cycle it picks one review that has not been shared, above a star threshold whose default is 4.0, from the window of the last few days — and if there is nothing there it widens the window once before giving up. Then an AI writes the caption in the tone, length and language set for the location, and it goes to the platforms you switched on: Facebook, Instagram, Google and TikTok, as a feed post or a story. Source: Climbo, Climbo review link and campaigns (Climbo's own product, What the software does, read in the product, 11 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-climbo-share-pick

Our website widget can inject LocalBusiness structured data with an aggregateRating into the page it sits on. We are keeping it in this guide because of what Google's documentation says about exactly that arrangement: a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for the review stars, so the markup does not produce the result people install it for. Treat the widget as something a visitor reads, not as a route to stars in search. Source: Climbo, Climbo review link and campaigns (Climbo's own product, What the software does, read in the product, 11 November 2026). Via Climbo: https://www.climbo.com/learn/how-to-share-reviews-on-social-media#stat-climbo-widget-schema

1. Treat the automatic posting as a draft queue until consent is your habit.The card carries the reviewer's name and photo, and we cannot ask their permission for you — Google does not give anybody the contact details. If you are going to run it automatically, make the permission question part of the reply you send to every good review, so that by the time the agent picks one, the answer already exists.
2. Know what the threshold is doing to the picture of your business.At four stars and above, with one review per cycle, the feed that comes out is a slow stream of praise. That is what it is for. It is also why pairing it with the occasional hand-made post about a complaint you fixed is what keeps the account looking like a business rather than a brochure.
3. Use the widget as a shop window, not as an SEO device.It shows real reviews to a visitor who is deciding, which is worth having. The structured data it can inject will not produce stars in Google Search for a business publishing reviews about itself, and anyone who tells you otherwise is quoting a blog post rather than Google's documentation.
4. Check the post before the platform does.Source named, official logo, no invented badge, no stars next to the platform's name, the review's own date and rating on the card. Our templates let you build a card that breaks every one of those; the rules belong to the platforms, and they are the ones with the delete button.

If you run this for clients

At agency scale the risk is not a badly designed post. It is that you are the publisher, across forty brands, of review information you did not collect and cannot verify — and that the consent question has forty answers, none of them written down. Four things keep it defensible.

1. Get the consent rule into the contract, not the kick-off call.One clause: the client confirms that reviews used in marketing may be used, or asks the reviewer through the reply. It costs nothing at signature and it is the difference between a mistake being theirs or yours.
2. Standardise the card once, centrally.Source, date, the review's own rating, official logo, no stars by the logo. Build it into the template every location inherits, so compliance is the default output rather than a checklist somebody reads in January.
3. Never run a client's testimonial wall by hand.A hand-curated page is a selection, and a selection is the practice the UK rule bans in all circumstances. Feed the client's site from the live reviews, score and count, and you have removed the question.
4. Report what was posted, with the permission beside it.A monthly list of posts, each with the review it came from and whether consent was given or asked for. It is the only artefact that answers the one question a client's lawyer will ever ask about this service.

Related reports

Each figure lives on one page only. These cover the neighbouring questions.

Questions people ask

Updates

First published 12 November 2026. Every source on this page was last reopened and its figures confirmed on 12 November 2026. That date moves when a source is checked again, not when the page is rebuilt, and a figure is replaced only if the publishing organisation has changed it.